DevOps is a powerful idea that proposes the marriage of the development and operations sides of a technology company in a union that can lead to faster development, lower costs and ultimately better products.

Given its potential, DevOps is also one of the hottest topics in the tech sector. In April, WTIA’s Tech in Focus event explored the idea in a wide-ranging talk by three leading experts: Mandi Walls of Chef; Nimret Sandhu from Dev9; and George Sadlier of Google. DevOps is a new way of thinking about tech production, one that integrates the beginning and end of product development in a more continuous process, they explained to nearly 90 people who attended the event at Google’s offices in the Fremont neighborhood of Seattle or listened to the live stream.

As revolutionary as DevOps sounds, it is not an altogether new idea. Many of its concepts date back to organizational change theories that swept Toyota and manufacturing in general as far back as the 1980s, Walls suggested.

It’s about “empowering the individuals to do what’s right for your product and for your customers, and allowing them to make decisions where command-and-control management system sort of suppresses that desire and that urge, which then suppresses people’s ability to do a job very well for you,” said Walls, author of the book “Building a DevOps Culture.”

Embracing DevOps means an organization has to break down traditional silos that separate developers and operations engineers in tech companies. Ultimately, everybody has to embrace the organizational transformation, added Walls, who is a technical practice manager at Chef, a leading IT automation and systems integration company.

“Siloing basically creates artificial barriers. This culture of throwing it over the wall. ‘It’s not my problem,’ ” said Nimret Sandhu, a solutions architect at Dev9. “We are all in this together.”

How do you know if your company is ready to embrace DevOps? If your colleagues already are breaking down walls that’s a good sign, according to Dev9’s Sandhu. He offered a few other signs:

• Development takes too long.
• The organization is open to change.
• Groups within the organization are working collaboratively.

The DevOps approach can appeal to both developers and operations engineers because it can create smoother, integrated, and more efficient product development. In practice, DevOps introduces a new set of tools, innovative systems and best characteristics, panelists said. DevOps is also tied into Agile, Open Source, and Cloud-hosted databases and applications.

While engineers see the potential of this approach sometimes “they don’t know how to get there,” observed Paul Owen, who moderated the panel and founded Owen Media. If you are interested in DevOps here are a few resources that can help you get there:

• 10 Deploys per Day: Dev and ops cooperation at Flickr, Velocity, 2009. (A breakthrough presentation cited by Walls.)
• “Building a DevOps Culture,” by Mandi Walls.
• Mandi Walls on Twitter: @lnxchk.